In IRS vs. Tea Party, all signs point to bias

After President Obama took office, conservatives began organizing at the grass-roots level under the Tea Party banner. Everyone remembers the boisterous protest rallies, entertainers, like Glenn Beck, who associated themselves with the movement, and politicians, like Marco Rubio, elected with Tea Party support. For an election cycle, the Tea Party made history. And its achievements would've been impossible without the hard work of conservative community organizers who completed unglamorous tasks like setting up websites, securing protest permits at far-flung city halls and filing with the Internal Revenue Service as nonprofit organizations.

In many cases, the IRS responded to those citizen activists with burdensome demands for more information. Many felt they were being unfairly targeted based on their political beliefs. What we've just learned is that they were absolutely right.

Employees at an IRS office in Cincinnati singled out applications from small-government groups for extra scrutiny, officials at the agency have apologetically admitted.

IRS officials initially claimed that leaders at the top of the agency were unaware of the misconduct. But the Wall Street Journal reports that "a high-ranking IRS official knew as early as mid-2011 that conservative groups were being inappropriately targeted, nearly a year before then-Commissioner Douglas Shulman told a congressional committee the agency wasn't targeting conservative groups."

Now, even President Obama is expressing disapproval.

How did it all happen?

A nonprofit organization can claim tax exempt, 501(c)(4) status if it is mostly supporting education or social welfare, but not if its focus is on electioneering.

Several years ago, the IRS faced an explosion of new nonprofit organizations and tried to figure out which ones deserved tax-exempt status. "So, some folks in the Cincinnati office tried to come up with a quick filter to flag groups that deserved extra scrutiny," Liberal blogger Kevin Drum writes. "But what should that flag be? Well, three years ago, the explosion happened to be among tea party groups, so they began searching their database for applications with 'Tea Party,' 'Patriots,' or '9/12' in the organization's name as well as other 'political sounding' names."

As he notes, that was a dumb idea.

Economics writer Megan McArdle explains why, in explicit detail. "If what you're concerned about is that most of the new groups being created are, in fact, thinly disguised electioneering vehicles, then what you want to do is take a random sample of the new groups, review them, and see what percentage turn out to be self-dealing," she writes. "Instead, the IRS method for dealing with the volume was to take a nonrandom sample.

"And how did they decide that you deserved extra scrutiny? Because you had 'tea party' or 'patriot' in your name. Since the Tea Party was a brand new movement in 2010, they couldn't possibly have had any data indicating that such groups were more likely to be doing something improper. So how exactly did they come up with this filter? There is no answer that does not ultimately resolve to political bias."

In fact, the IRS perpetrated the most alarming sort of political bias: agents of the state marshaled its tremendous power in a way that disadvantaged the ruling party's political critics. That civil servants and appointees at the top of the IRS knew about this scandalous behavior for months before revealing it to Congress and the public only adds to the agency's culpability.

And there is still more to the story than the IRS has admitted. According to ProPublica, an investigative news organization, the IRS didn't just solicit extra information from conservative applicants, it violated their confidentiality by releasing some of their information to journalists. Congress is now duty-bound to investigate the IRS, and there's no telling what a close look inside the Cincinnati office will find.

Register opinion columnist Conor Friedersdorf is also a staff writer for The Atlantic.

Republican, Democratic strategists on IRS scandal

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